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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   889 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 18, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What do we think about chess? My 5 year old daughter has become enamored with it lately, wants to play multiple times a day, doing some puzzles, all that good stuff. She's definitely improving fast - she impresses adults she plays who know how to play but aren't good haha - I'd benchmark at her at like a Class G player (ELO in the 600-700 range). I'm probably around an 1100 ELO, maybe a bit higher when I'm really focused.

Basically, trying to decide how much to encourage improvement in this vs other skills she enjoys (soccer, reading, etc) given Chess is a bit of a dead end? But if she enjoys it then it is a fun hobby and I like playing her...thinking we might try out a local scholastic club and see what we think.

Chess has limited transfer effects. It won't "develop the brain" very much except for getting better at chess/recognizing its patterns. I do like one thing about it though: It teaches the value of looking more than one step ahead when evaluating anything.

There's no career option in it, unless you're a very rare talent. Pretty much a dead end, as you say.

Chess players are usually kinda weird/nerdy. It takes a somewhat special person to spend hours every day on plugging away at it. Chicken or egg problem. Not sure how good the socializing aspect would be, I suspect not that good. I usually try to chat when I play online chess with mediocre results. But as deluxev2 says, it is pretty much respectable. Moreso than playing MMOs every day or something. Chess is "cleaner".

I guess I would encourage soccer just as much as chess? Decent hobby to spend a limited amount of time on though.

Paul Morphy said: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."

One of the weirdest things I noticed is that the best chess player in the family (he was in top 20 nation wide(small country tho) in his prime, I think) is so scatter-brained that car maintenance and dealing with paperwork was something his wife did.

He has legendary skills at messing up anything computer related.

That sounds like someone who went savant-like in for one thing at the expense of many other things he should have learned.

Makes me wonder if some types of activities that require focus have transfer effects while others don't. Meditation has improved my focus on anything and everything. Perhaps practicing chess does not.

His day job was mostly medical research and teaching. Wasn't unsuccessful at it, quite well regarded. Became a full professor eventually. (it's a bigger deal/more rare in eastern Europe than in US) Personally I think he wasn't (when younger) as scatter-brained as he pretended to be and used it as an excuse.

I find meditation really cool and its promises really interesting, and then every time I look further into it I’m reminded that the end goal is, essentially, voluntary ego death.

You talk about meditation a lot, so please forgive me for asking directly: does it not creep you out that this practice is supposed to end in you realising that you don’t really exist? Am I mistaken about the end result? Not the rhetoric, but the actual purpose of realising that theee isn’t a real you.

It's not "ego death". That's a bullshit term used by people who don't understand anything about awakening.

I've attained anatta (not-self) insight and I didn't lose anything I would have wanted to keep. You lose a delusion. You see that the "self" was just a peculiar form of content in your consciousness, consisting of a combination of physical sensations, feelings, images, and a very strong and convincing belief/concept. You see it as being a mirage and a process, a verb, rather than a noun. I'm still a human being with a body, mind, consciousness, feelings, perceptions. I just don't get fooled by combinations of phenomena in those aspects of human experience making up a "self". I still have an ego, I know who I am and the difference between me and other persons. It's kind of like, after having played an MMO with an avatar every day of your life thus far, you see it for an avatar, rather than a real physical thing that could somehow ever have inherent existence.

So when you realise that you don't exist, that's just about dropping a false belief and seeing the truth: that feeling of being a self was never born except as a mirage-like construct of the mind, and cannot die because it never truly existed. That's a relief. You still take care of your body and mind. Chop wood, carry water.

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